Skeptic

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Scientific skepticism or rational skepticism, sometimes referred to as skeptical inquiry, is a position in which one questions the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence.

Do not confuse this with General Skepticism, Philosophical Skepticism, or Denialism.

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"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." -David Hume

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submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It's going to come as such a shock to Ray Kurzweil when he dies.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I think he actually has a mental condition. He's getting more out there with each prediction. They started fairly reasonable, if you ignore the date predictions; now they're starting to violate known laws of physics.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

The headline is wildly misleading here.

The concept basically states that due to medical and technological advances, we will soon reach a point where our life expectancies lengthen by more than one year per year, effectively giving us time back on the clock.

It's not physically moving to a previous time period, but rather it's a very awkward way of speaking about advancing medical technology.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It sure feels like they're indulging a legitimately mentally unstable person. But their audience doesn't know that the way they talk about him.

Kurzweil is well known in the tech world for his impressive track record of accurately predicting timelines for technological advances. He successfully predicted the proliferation of portable computers (i.e. cell phones and laptops) and WiFi, the existence of cloud computing, and that a computer would beat a chess champion at the game by 1998 (which happened in 1997), among many others. That said, he’s also been wrong many times over. No one can predict the future, even with all the data in the world at their fingertips.

They bury that 'he's been wrong many times over' at the end because the "among many others" is bullshit. He's been right a handful of times and very wrong most of the rest of the time.

And honestly, I don't think any of those were hard to predict. Especially WiFi. It's not like we didn't already have two-way radio communication, including data transfers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Idk, based off of just saying we will being going back in time could mean regression and not actual time travel.

But idk who tf this guy is and im pretty sure anyone couldve guessed that anyways